I thought, during the time when I was still trying to be Henry David Thoreau, that I could make you love me.
I also thought—wrongly it would turn out— that I could make myself into the kind of person who thrived in this life of exile. I thought through sheer force of will, I could make myself the type of man who lived a perfect Gilmore Girls lifestyle—all town squares and quaint diner conversations. To be normal was a choice. To be one of them was an active decision.
At the time, I settled this as a sort of aesthetic preference, no different from a haircut or the latest trendy piece of fast-fashion dribble. To assimilate into small-town life was no different from electing to wear boat shoes or one of those sadly ironic bucket hats. And in fact, this is what most people wore here anyways. I remember being shocked when I first saw the outfits my new colleagues and neighbors wore. It wasn’t merely that the outfits themselves were not “in style,” it went beyond that. There seemed to be an almost conscious decision to not make any choice at all. Opting out of the decision-making process altogether. To me, it reeked of giving up—unattractive passivity— the thought of which had evidently never crossed their minds.
Perhaps if I could numb myself to this new costume, I could forget that I was on a stage altogether. Perhaps, I too could make surrendering work for me.
Part of me was genuinely hoping to press down that sense of superiority, inherited from a life in the city, long enough to become someone who ate $13 sushi from a wolf-themed pub that also specialized in something called a “Howl at the Moonwich Burger.” I craved the simplicity of it all: to have the highlight of my week be some watered-down chain restaurant martini or seeing someone who almost sort of, in the right light, looked just like Gwyneth Paltrow. I was determined to make this work for me. It was nice, I suppose, in a slightly twisted way, to be motivated by something again. I hadn’t been this sparked up by anything that didn’t come from a pharmacist in a long time.
I used to want more than this. A lot more. But during that time, though it’s hard to admit, some could say I had been too glutinous. I had wrung my existence dry, searching for every droplet of pleasure, every piece of juicy plot line like the marrow of a bone. The thing I craved most was an orgy of a life— all mountain peaks and black lights, fingers pulling my body in every direction, stuffing me full and pulling me apart all at once. I wanted lush sweeping scores and pulsing synths at underground raves filled with open mouths and bathroom stalls. I wanted something that looked interesting on paper—and in time— on film. But I didn’t want it to look like I wanted it to look good either. And I wanted it all to come easy, and to be free, and to feel fucking amazing.
Still, you can’t force a cinematic existence. You can’t force your life to be something it just isn’t.
I think it’s bullshit when someone tells you they are content with their life. What do you mean you’re just happy with what you have— look around, there’s so much more out there. Is this really all you want your life to surmount to? How naive do you have to be to not even realize you’re settling? And for crumbs no less? Is this really as good as you can imagine your life getting? Seems awfully sad. Still, this was the mindset I earnestly was trying to hypnotize myself into. Simple-minded sweet nobodies who could never dream of a life better than what they had. Peg and Paul Dolty from Shitholeville, Missouri who never left the country and still think avocados are “a bit showy.”
It’s hard to say if I actually wanted this, or just felt it was the only option left still standing. Lord knows I had been burning through the opportunities afforded to a gifted child ever since I’d been appointed that moniker. And besides, now that I had lost my apartment, my primary source of income, and any hope to get back on that track I had tried so hard to achieve—and then maybe just as hard to tear apart piece by systematic piece—what was next?
When the opportunity to embody this character presented itself, I had no choice but to take it.
Like an out-of-work actor, grey in the tooth and desperate for another fifteen minutes in the sun, I decided that yes I could do this. Yes, I could pack up my life in the city. Say goodbye to the rush and the comedown. I could trade in rooftop bars and designer clothing (never afforded and always bought using payment plans or one of my many dodgy credit cards) for miles and miles of nothing-filled fields and gas station coffee that tasted exactly like their wet paper filters. I was excited to be someone else for a change. Even though in this case, something else really just meant something less.
This loss of mass hardly mattered much, I was already deep in the process of shrinking— of enacting my own disappearing act. The prevailing theory was that if I made myself small enough before I left, no one would be able to see the ways in which I had failed. A single speck of sand fits in comfortably amongst the beach because no one remembers the boulder it once was. I wanted to disappear long before it was the only option left for me. Perhaps the thing I wanted to be most of all, was to not be even a little bit.
Breaking my lease came with an awful feeling of finality, worse than all the weeks leading up to it where I pretended to be too sick and depressed to leave my bedroom in hopes that my friends would, I don’t know, forget that I existed? I suppose only half of that was untrue, or maybe none of it was untrue, depending on how you view the affliction of mental illness. I don’t want to pathologize you. But one thing that did surprise me, was just how seemingly easy I was to forget. How easily I was able to drift into the floorboards like some long-lost ghost, barley even a name. This unnerved me. After all, I wanted to become invisible, but I hadn’t expected this suggestion to be so willingly accepted. And besides, I had spent the last three years working to convince everyone I knew that I was special. I was trying to narrativize my own life, create a cult of personality, prove to everyone around me that I was someone who had meaning; someone to be listened to. I guess I was unaware of how potent my powers of persuasion had become.
I suppose I thought, I had built up more good-will than that. I thought, and maybe this is something I am still working through, that these people actually cared about me. I thought through all the drug-hazed parties and expensive events hosted by new fast-casual startups, that I was actually connecting with people. I thought I had friends.
I try to tell myself that this was not as dire as it seemed, and after all, I know I played a not-so-insignificant role in the re-casting my own life. It was a slow descent into obscurity, one which I had always assumed would be a lot harder to enact than it turned out to be. Part of me assumed retreating in this way would feel a lot more like running from the cops, a bandit hiding out in a shack on the edge of a swamp sustaining myself only on moonshine and mostly expired canned goods. All the while, I half-expected even the barista I bought a $10 Lavender Latte from every day to ask me, “Hey where have you been? We haven’t seen you in forever.”
I wanted to be missed. I wanted to be chased down. Even in my absence, I needed to know that I was still taking up space. I’ve always felt like a little brain parasite anyways. It stands to reason that my sickness should have spread to those around me as well.
Whether I admitted it or not, trying to live off the grid was an act in futility, especially if you leave said “grid” fully intact. I remained extremely online throughout the whole process of moving, tracking the comings and goings of all my friends from my prestigious writing program, keeping tabs on their activity so I could later hold their silence against them. The other gifted students and bright young minds who I spent the majority of my time huffing nitrous oxide with didn’t know this, but in a way, I was testing their allegiance. How important was I to you actually? It was a sick perversion, but I needed to know my withdrawal had affected them. And that hopefully, it was making their lives worse too.
That’s the thing about social media, you can say it’s about connecting communities all you want, but it’s always been designed as a more impersonal cipher for our most animalistic interests. An exercise in schadenfreude.
Howard Glynne commented on a forest photo of mine three weeks after we stopped talking with simply, “Great pic!”
There would be no follow-up.
I can concede, the picture was a touch pretentious. It was exactly the kind of pseudo-intellectualist Robert Frost-ing about that our professors urged us against in school. But I couldn’t help it, I needed something to prove that I hadn’t entirely ceased to exist. I mean, of course, I had. But I still wanted to work this into my narrative in some way. Some of the greatest authors took time away in the woods to hone their craft. A hermitage is good for the creative spirit, given that the aforementioned hermit actually has anything left of import to say, or hell even the drive to write anything beyond a shopping list or a single rhyming couplet.
A nomad, a hermit, a story to tell
Walk together through forest, through thicket, and dell
Either way, Howard Glynne was one of the best writers in our Boston University writing intensive, and the spring prior I had helped him sneak into a sold-out show at the Sinclair and split half a Xanax with him on the dance floor— so I’d say he owes me more than nine characters.
I don’t particularly like Xanax. Or, perhaps I should say, it’s not my drug of choice. I’ve never turned it down, but that’s only because it would just be bad economics to do such a thing. No, I much prefer Adderall. I first got a prescription for the small little blue pills sometime in high school. I can’t really remember when because, of course at the time, I was so depressed that time itself felt hard to pin down. High school may have been four years or it might have been a hundred. It’s impossible to say, but I’d settle for somewhere around the seventy-year mark at least. Since then they’ve been my secret weapon against losing my spark. Since then they’ve helped me dazzle and sparkle and keep teachers saying fabulous things about me like,
“Rory, this piece is remarkable. You should be very proud.”
Or, “Have you considered submitting your writing to our gifted student’s program?”
“See, it’s a good thing you didn’t kill yourself, look at the amazing insight you got out of it. Through pain is great art.”
And they were right. My writing was amazing. Whenever I actually could sit down with myself long enough to write anything.
Or maybe it wasn’t.
That’s the hardest part about constantly hearing that you have “it.” Whatever “it" is exactly. I can never parse through what makes my work any worse than any of the rest of it. Of course, I can always tell when someone else has written something good, or something better. I can see their prose dripping with ephemeral family traumas or their dialogue still bright and snappy in a naturalistic way. The rest of my cohort seemed especially adept, better at this than me, and not particularly mired down by whatever germ had claimed me and my “budding young talent.”
Whenever, sat down in a large oblong blob, me and the rest of my classmates were made to read aloud from our MacBook screens, I felt like the furthest thing from special or gifted. I felt as though any of that alleged sparkle or dazzle had long since dried up and crusted over in the shape of a hard brown scab. I felt around in my canvas tote bag for my small metal Altoid container. It was a relief even to touch it, to know that my shine was right at my fingertips. I just needed to excuse myself to go to the bathroom.
And that seems to be happening a lot more as of late.
“You don’t always have to worry yourself with being the very best writer in the class Rory,” my advisor would tell me during our monthly check-ins that I stopped going to after November. “It only gets in the way of your craft.”
Academics, specifically ones who were alive during the Nixon administration, love to use words like “craft,” or “piece,” or worse yet “art" when referring to the dinky writing assignments prescribed to us through our online portals. An effort, I think, to bring our classrooms into the new millennium. Only of course this too was at least five years late. I think speaking this way helps these professors legitimize the whole process to themselves, and partly to us as well—or more realistically for the parents who are paying to send their precious gifted children to a liberal arts college. But I was supposed to be different. I wasn’t just in the gifted writer’s program, I had a full-ride. My scholarship was paid for by grants and foundations and intersectional groups who: “Aimed to diversify the written word with new and exciting voices!” So my assignments needed to actually be art. They were actually supposed to say something, and mean something, and move my professors to tears or change their small little minds, all while maintaining a “clear and concise narrative voice and adhering to the course requirements as outlined in the syllabus.”
This too was bullshit. Most things in university were.
By February, dehydrated and fifteen pounds underweight, I was called in to speak with my advisor. Technically speaking, I had been served three warnings in regards to my absences before this point, but I still haughtily responded as if I had no idea why I was being summoned in such a way. How dare the school, which paid for my living expenses and room and board, break up my Tuesday afternoon. Besides, I was still hungover from the night before, or perhaps the night before that? Either way, I did not want to sit under those industrial lights and be lectured by a woman who’s greatest literary contribution to date was a poetry book about dogs which was illustrated by her niece which “sold big in her hometown.” I didn’t aspire to be big in my hometown. Who did?
“Rory, please sit down.” She gestured to the university-sanctioned armchair across from her desk. It was the same chair found in a few of the common areas—a tufted red leather sort with steel grommets. There must have been some kind of sale, or bulk pricing because these chairs were everywhere on campus. Without even meaning to I played through a few of the unconscious associations I had with the uncomfortably squishy seat. I thought about how I missed my Thanksgiving train home by accidentally taking a nap in this very chair in the University library, or how my friend Han and I had “borrowed” one from the student center and lugged it to her third-floor walk-up in Packards Corner. Now I sat there again, my body automatically remembering these contours, for what would certainly be the last time.
“I don’t know how to say this delicately, so I am just going to come out and say it,” I’m getting kicked out, just say it bitch.
Deborah Aether looked like she was going to be sick. She was pale, more so than usual, and her hands were doing that suffocating tense thing where your palms are placed face down unnaturally in hyper-extension. It looked like she was straining to keep herself upright— like she was doing some kind of forced push-up.
“Your attendance and grades have been of concern to the program—and of course me as well as your advisor,” she added this last part in as a self-soothing piece of humanity. “I’m sure this doesn’t come as a surprise to you.”
“No,” I said, shocking myself with how meekly it came out.
“The university feels,” she stopped herself, clearly having had rehearsed this well before I entered her office, “As per the guidelines of our University, any and all students in our advanced placement programs must adhere to a specific—”
“I’m being kicked out.” I said, partially to save her the pain of continuing through her robotic speech, and partially because my migraine had returned. I needed to be face down.
“We wouldn’t use those words. But in effect, and this pains me to say…” of this there was no question, “…starting effectively you will no longer be enrolled in the Advanced Writing fellowship program. You can always re-apply in the future,” she stammered.
“But right now, it’s not working” I said. “I know.” And I did, I wasn’t a complete idiot, I could see the sinking ship all around me, I just didn’t know how to write about it, or particularly want to I suppose. “Is that all?” I added coldly.
Deborah must have felt the chill, and I felt a tinge of regret, she was already clearly going through it. She had always looked old, but in this light she looked ancient almost dusty. Though I suppose I didn’t look much better with my bloodshot eyes and forehead that was somehow always sweaty and plastered with my stringy blonde hair.
“Well, there’s also the matter of your scholarship—and of course your off-campus housing which is in part being paid for,” she said. “Student services will want to speak to you today at 1:30, do you know where their office is?” I nodded.
“Taking off my advisor hat for a second here,” people loved saying this sort of thing, “I’m worried about you Rory, your submission portfolio was one of the best collections I’d seen in really a long time. I remember thinking to myself, this young man has a lot of promise, and I hope you know I still believe that. I just hope you can work out whatever is going on in your personal life,” she stopped long enough for me to see her register how I looked, “and get back to what I know you can achieve.”
“Yeah, thanks I guess. Are we done here?”
I walked out of her office after I couldn’t stomach her sad eye routine any longer. As I moved I touched the tin in my bag which I already knew would be lighter than I’d hoped, although not altogether empty. Either way, it wouldn’t be hardly enough to get me through my 1:30 appointment with my executioner, so I opened my phone and punched in the number for a friend of a friend. I was going to need a top-off on my sparkle supply. It was turning out to be a very long day.